toothbrush baby blanket
Saturday, mar. 15, 2008 | 0 comments
This misshapen thing, all 4'x3'ish of it, came from one huge ball of non-sex-specific turquoise acrylic (read: washable, read: the only sane material for anything designed to lay under the astounding mess that is baby), which I bought at scary JoAnn's to the tune of $6.99. Twenty hours of mind-numbingly easy back-and-forth later (while on the train, while watching CSI, while listening attentively to my mother's one-on-one "my dreams, what are they, and how to finance them?" seminar), I had this fuzzy, stretchy, slightly irregular thing:
It was a lot of turquoise. So much turquoise! I decided to offset it with a little decorative element. And because the one thing all infants dream of is having a full set of teeth to brush, I settled on the image of a toothbrush.
This was just another one of my "Sharpie on teeshirt" drawings, cut out and then stitched down with a lighter turquoise embroidery thread.
A little weird? But very warm. But maybe something that would have been cheaper and cuter at Ikea?
hotdog laptop cozy
Saturday, mar. 15, 2008 | 0 comments
I was raised to never buy anything white. White things -- pants, carpet, cars -- are nothing but magnets for dirt and disaster. So what kind of laptop do I get? A stupid white iBook G3, so dumb. And of course within a week of buying the thing, it had managed to collect a maddening series of scratches that looked very much like dirt. Clearly my frail little egg of a laptop needed a gentle nest to protect it from the world, and vice versa.
As those laptop wetsuit things are way too expensive, I decided to just crochet something up, something fast and cheap. And about 1.5 hours later, the hotdog laptop cozy was born:
The yarn of the bun i got at Walgreens for a few dollars, the yarn of the dog is just someleft over pink fuzzy wool (about $5 at Michael's) that I bought for a scarf. Both the elements are just long, basic-stitch rectangles that I crocheted together (the bun I folded in half and crocheted the sides closed to create a pocket, the dog I crocheted the two ends together to create a circle). Easy! And, better still, both elements second as terrific headgear:
And here is an easter-egg version I made for the one-and-only Jill:
the go-between
Saturday, mar. 15, 2008 | 0 comments
I don't know if buy my pants too low and my shirts too short or I simply have an unusually long torso, but more often than not, my pants-based outfits leave me with a strip of Evany-tummy twisting in the wind. I used to safety-pin my shirts to my belt loops, which kind of worked but made restroom breaks time-consuming and pointedly hazardous. But then I came up with this really good invention: The Go-Between! Just look:
Brrrr! It's cold in here!
Getting warmer ...
... warmer ...
... now that's hot.
(Note: That there's the Birtee.)
I made a second go-between using an old tee-shirt that I'd accidentally ruined by washing with a red splotching item. I didn't even sew anything, just trimmed off the bottom,
folded it under to hide the red stains (which for some reason you can't see here),
and voi-da!
Before: Uh-oh. Somebody's got ass-crack fever
(and I'm not talking about Marbles the Cat).
After: The the jukebox is officially out of order!
Let's take a closer look at that go-between in action
(hey, isn't that one of my beloved cockeyed.com tops?):
more words on: marbles
the placemat pillow
Saturday, mar. 15, 2008 | 0 comments
My friend Liz Dunn gave me these two huge, black velvet pillows years ago, back when I didn't really have enough seating for TV night. But since my new apartment's "color scheme" is pretty bright, the dark pillows didn't really go, so I decorated them with these great fabric placemats I found on sale in Santa Cruz.
Notice how well the cushion coordinates with my HUGE television, especially when the aquarium tape is playing.
I thought this was going to be a super easy project, just start stitching and go. But even though I pinned everything down ahead of time, the placemats still migrated as I sewed, so they'd either be super off-center or there'd be horrible wrinkles underneath them. I probably would have been better off cutting up the sham and sewing everything together properly, like with a machine, but I wanted to be able to take the placemats off if I got sick of them, so I just wound up doing each pillow about three separate times, which was a pain because I used really, really teensy stitches.
Pretty dumb!
sweater fix
Saturday, mar. 15, 2008 | 0 comments
Apparently gossamer "summer cashmere" isn't supposed to be put in the washing machine? Aw.
But look at the cute patch I made out of layered squares cut from another, even more broken winter cashmere sweater.
In addition to its criminal flimsiness, the dumb summer sweater also features a disappointing snugness across the belly, which I addressed by adding side slits (ripping out the seams, finish-stitching the edges, and adding a decorative button anchor at the hem).
And it kind of works! The peek-a-boo slits bag a little strangely, and the black of the patch is slightly off from the black of the sweater, but in practice it all comes together passably well. The patches would be better off, I think, if I'd had an entirely different color to work with, chartruese or rust maybe. So I guess all I have to do now is buy some sweaters in a variety of cute colors and ruin them to make patch fodder!
